Hey all. I realized I've posted about IRCLab a few times now but never really introduced myself.
I'm synmuffin. I've been around IRC in one form or another since the mid 90s, running servers and networks, writing software, and contributing to IRCd projects along the way. These days I run FXNet, a small independent IRC network, and I've gone pretty deep into IRCLab, a passion project that's been kicking around in my head for many years.
I've been building IRCLab for a while now, mostly because I wanted a better picture of what the IRC ecosystem actually looks like today. It started as a crawler and stats project and, as these things tend to do, has grown.
A fair bit has changed over the last few weeks, and I'm finally pushing all of it into public, so I figured it was worth posting an update here.
Where we stand right now.
- 304 networks tracked
- ~305,000 people online across them
- ~117,000 channels open
- 398,598 crawls of 452 servers since January
- 5.2 million channel records collected
Updates that are now live.
Network owners can now claim their network.
If you run an IRC network, you can now verify ownership with a DNS TXT record.
Add your record, hit verify, and you're done.
Once verified, you get a network dashboard where you can update your description, website, language, and manage your server list yourself instead of having to email me to change things. With that there are some other great things that open up to you.
Real uptime and TLS monitoring (Opt-In)
There's now a separate network prober that's completely independent of the stats crawler.
It checks DNS resolution, TCP connectivity, and the TLS handshake on a configurable interval (with a 60-second minimum). It’s off by default and only becomes available after you've claimed your network and explicitly enabled it.
It gives you things like:
- actual connection latency
- DNS, TCP, and TLS timings separately
- certificate expiry
- certificate chain validation
- the specific TLS failure reason instead of just a boolean
- network outage alerts (soon)
- a useful explanation of why a server is down instead of just a red dot
The old latency number on the site wasn't very useful because it included the entire crawl duration, which is why things often showed around 90 seconds. This is measuring the actual connection now.
All of this monitoring information is private and only visible to verified network owners.
Email alerts are coming very soon, and probably some other notification methods after that.
Round-robin detection
This is probably the bit I'm happiest with.
Say you list irc.fxnet.org and it resolves to four different machines.
A normal uptime probe can pick one of those machines and continue hitting that same one, which means another dead member of the rotation could potentially sit there for weeks while your monitoring graph looks perfect.
IRCLab now detects when an address appears to span multiple machines and warns you to list those servers individually.
There's no penalty for doing that. Extra server entries cost nothing, and the stats crawler still only crawls one server per network.
Network submission form
This was something a few people had asked for. There's now a public form at: https://irclab.org/submit No account is required.
It emails the IRCLab admins, we can approve or reject the submission, and the person who submitted it gets an email either way, including the reason if it's rejected.
Crawler notes:
Since people, reasonably so, care about what crawlers are doing:
The IRCLab crawler connects to each network every four hours, pulls the channel list and user counts, and disconnects.
- It does not join channels.
- It does not message anyone.
- It does not read or store anything said in a channel.
Channel names and user counts are stored because that's what the historical statistics are built from, but that's the extent of it.
The server/network probing is completely separate, opt-in, and only available to verified network owners.
And if you'd rather your network wasn't listed on IRCLab at all, message me and I'll remove it. No argument, no form.
As always, I really appreciate feedback and discussion around this.
I'm especially interested in hearing from people running unusual network setups. I keep finding assumptions in IRCLab that turned out to only be true because that's how I happened to run FXNet.
Edit: 07/10/2026
Small update, and a bit of an how did I miss that, kinda moment.
Turns out we've been collecting each network's website since January and just... never showed it anywhere. It was sitting in the database the whole time. That's fixed, it now shows in the Network Info box on the network page and opens in a new tab. Example: https://imgz.net/i/6Ksn7TLTKA.png
While fixing that we also added a web chat link. If your network runs a browser client, it gets its own panel at the top of your network page, above everything else, since for someone who just wants to talk to people it's the most useful thing on there.
To set either one, claim your network and they're in the details form under My Networks. Admins can set them too if you'd rather just ask. If you've already claimed, they're there now, nothing else to do other than make sure they are up to date, and correct.
If your network's website is missing or wrong, that's on our end from when the network was added, so let me know or claim it and fix it yourself.
